Beginning of Essay
Both the physical distance that Local Area Network (LAN) can cover and the number of hosts that can be attached to it are limited. To overcome this limitation, bridges are introduced as devices which connect LANs at the MAC layer. The purpose of bridges is to allo ....

Middle of Essay
.... low-cost, low-delay, high-bandwidth (e.g., 1-10 Mbps) broadcast channels. A bridged LAN environment preserves the low-delay and high-bandwidth feature but its topology may be more dynamic than in a single LAN due to possible bridge or LAN failures and hosts being moved around. Bridge routing algorithms should meet the following requirements: 1) A bridges LAN environment should resemble a single LAN environment as closely as possible. In other words, the extension should be transparent to hosts. 2) The transparency requirement extends to performance requirements, such as low transmission delays, low undetected data corruption and FIFO maintenance. 3) ....